Phiala Shanahan works in theoretical nuclear and particle physics, with a focus on understanding the structure and interactions of hadrons and nuclei from the fundamental degrees of freedom encoded in the Standard Model of particle physics. She received her PhD from the University of Adelaide in 2015 and held a postdoctoral position at MIT and joint positions as Assistant Professor at the College of William & Mary and Senior Staff Scientist at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, before joining the MIT physics faculty in 2018. Among her honors are an NSF CAREER award, a DoE Early Career Award, the Maria Goeppert Mayer Award from the American Physical Society, the Bragg Gold Medal from the Australian Institute of Physics, and a Simons Foundation Emmy Noether fellowship.